


fool's errand

by v3ilfire



Series: keep you away from the down side of me [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, These fuckin nerds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:54:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9156589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v3ilfire/pseuds/v3ilfire
Summary: “Well, thanks, I think. You should go get some sleep before tomorrow. It’s a long ride home.” She glanced up just long enough to see him grinning at her again and it was enough to get her to do the same despite every effort to maintain any level of composure whatsoever.“Of course. You should do the same.”“Sure,” she yawned, “As soon as I puzzle out how to get this blighted thing off me. I’d have an easier time escaping from being strapped to the underbelly of an angry bronto.” Tevra had to pretend she didn’t see him turn just a little red (redder?) while he tried his best to word a question he’d never had to ask before.“I -- would it be overstepping … boundaries … if I offered to help with that? It’s just -- you seem tired and --”Tevra stepped aside without allowing him to finish. “Cullen. Please.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> i have nothing to say for myself except they are nerds

It was one thing to have a dedicated team of people to dress her, but at the end the longest night of her life Tevra and her heavy, clunking limbs had to reverse-engineer her entire outfit or risk being stabbed by a concealed weapon in the middle of the night; a thought which ranked pretty low on a scale of events from ‘had a glass of expensive wine’ to ‘decided the direction of the Orlesian Empire’. The _last_ thing she needed was either that or to have one of the dozens of hidden smoke bombs go off in her face while she was fumbling with some buckle - it wouldn’t be the first time and she did _not_ want everything to taste like burnt dirt for a week again.

Someone knocked at the door just as she was trying desperately to undo the clasps that sat dead in the middle of her back (and failing, thanks to a stiff shoulder that was the direct result of being slammed into not one but _two_ different but equally gaudy fountains). Tevra barely withheld an audible groan and instead settled for dropping her arms down to her sides and her head as far back as her neck would let her. The thought of standing as still as possible until her visitor went away crossed her mind, but considering that she blinked and then got _woken up_ by the second set of knocks, it seemed a better idea to just get the interaction over with.

“Just grin and bear it,” she whispered to herself on her way to greet whatever menace Orlais had left to spit at her in the middle of the night. At least Cullen looked as exhausted as she felt, considering the dark circles already forming under his eyes and the way he rubbed the bridge of his nose, obviously completely unaware that the door in front of him had even been opened. “A bit late for a social call, don’t you think?” He jolted a little, but as soon as their eyes met, two tired, involuntary smiles followed. She hated it almost as much as she couldn’t look away or get her face to go back to normal.  
“Josephine asked me to deliver these to you,” he said, holding up a small stack of papers. That did the trick in regards to straightening her face situation out. Instead, Tevra’s mouth thinned into a line as she eyed the reports, all the while trying desperately to figure out what she’d done to offend the Ambassador so gravely that she needed her to read things _in the middle of the night_.  

After a long enough silence without any indication on how to continue this interaction, Cullen simply handed the paperwork to her - and sure, Tevra _took_ all of it, but as soon as the parchment was in her hands it was tossed onto the nearest chair and she was back to fiddling with a buckle near her shoulder.  
“Well, thanks, I think. You should go get some sleep before tomorrow. It’s a long ride home.” She glanced up just long enough to see him grinning at her again and it was enough to get her to do the same despite every effort to maintain any level of composure _whatsoever.  
_ “Of course. You should do the same.”  
“Sure,” she yawned, “As soon as I puzzle out how to get this _blighted thing_ off me. I’d have an easier time escaping from being strapped to the underbelly of an angry bronto.” Tevra had to pretend she didn’t see him turn just a _little_ red (redder?) while he tried his best to word a question he’d never had to ask before.  
“I -- would it be overstepping … boundaries … if I offered to help with that? It’s just -- you seem tired and --”  
Tevra stepped aside without allowing him to finish. “Cullen. Please.” 

Having Cullen in her room in the dead of night just to help her get undressed was inherently scandalous no matter the intent, so once he was inside she glanced both ways into the dark of the hall and closed _both_ latches on the door. Not that she didn’t trust Josephine’s contacts, but Orlesian walls had eyes and ears and apparently sometimes hands, and though that last one was yet to be confirmed she wasn’t sure what the implication of that rumor was anyway and hoped to keep it that way.

Now, Cullen was not a forward man by any means, but he seemed to drop all of his usual reservations the moment Tevra pointed out the troublesome clasps in question. She wasn’t surprised at how quickly he worked considering that he was essentially a walking armory on any regular day, but she _was_ a little taken aback about how much she really didn’t care that he was quite literally undressing her. Apparently a mix of exhaustion and a healthy paranoia of being caught doing nothing at all was more than enough to dwarf any potential sense of intimacy. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.  
  
“Did they expect you to do this on your own?” Cullen griped behind her. “Ah - your hair -”  
“Got it,” she said, and reached back to swing the entire mass over one shoulder, giving him access to whatever clasp seemed to be at the base of her neck. “You know, it _did_ take a small army to get me _into_ all this today.” She pressed her hand up against the breastplate to catch it as soon as she felt it start to fall from her shoulders. “Though to be honest I don’t think I could take another two hours of people fussing over me right now.”  
“Maker, two hours to dress one person. Do you need me for anything else, then?”  
Tevra shrugged. “Only if you’d like to be my backup plan in case I lock myself into my own shirt, or something.” She’d meant it as a joke, but seemingly without thinking twice about it Cullen just sat down on the edge of her bed with another sigh and dropped his chin into the palm of his hand. “... Alright. Are you sure?”  
“Of course. I’d feel terrible if we found you strangled by a sleeve in the morning.” She smiled first that time, which didn’t make the situation any better. She heard an echo of Sera’s voice as she bent to look for the hidden seams in her boots. She usually just wanted them to _stop staring and just get a room, already_. Plenty of unoccupied ones in Skyhold, and all that. 

Void. When did it even _get_ like that between them?

The boots came off as soon as she wasn’t at risk of slicing the backs of her ankles clean open, and once the smoke bombs were out of her sleeves, so did the bracers they’d hidden underneath them. Tevra was _pretty sure_ that was all of the _really_ dangerous stuff, which was good enough for her. She looked up ready to dismiss Cullen back to his room, but what she found instead was a man who’d fallen completely asleep sitting up as she’d left him.  
“Are you even awake?”  
“What? No. Yes. Just resting my eyes.”  
“I see.”  

Tevra remained unconvinced until his breathing finally slowed, and that’s how she was proven completely right and thus given rights to be smug in the morning. Except now she had a choice to make: wake him and send him to his room, or just… let him stay. Her head definitely thought it’d be better to ask him to leave, but every single bone in her body said otherwise. It’d been a long night, she didn’t really feel comfortable being _alone_ in some Orlesian manor, and well… she was making excuses where she didn’t really need any. She kind of just wanted him around.  

Whatever strange, warm thing they’d been nursing the last few months was starting to peep through the cracks. She didn’t know where it started, only that it _did_ , and now there she was, standing in the middle of a huge bedroom in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to ask this already-sleeping man if he wanted to spend the night there with her, in her bed, because they were both tired and for some Maker-forsaken reason she seemed to _like_ him. Certainly if someone told her a year ago that her feelings in regards to the Commander would turn around completely, she would never have believed them. Then again, most of her life could fall under that same category.

Thankfully overthinking was never much Tevra’s style, especially not when she was _that_ tired. Her drooping eyelids convinced her to gently shake Cullen awake and just wing it from there.  
“I’m up,” he said, though clearly _barely_.  
“You can just stay here if you want, you know.” Well, blunt was _one_ way to do it, right? The question woke him up, at least.  
“What? _Here?_ With you?” Tevra blinked. He seemed to be in such shock that she had to re-evaluate the entirety of their interactions over the last several months in less than ten seconds. Was she missing something?  
“You don’t _have_ to, I just thought -- “ _Just thought that since you almost kissed me on the balcony this wouldn’t be weird._ A stupid thought, in retrospect. Worse still, one she never finished out loud.  
“Just thought?” Shit. Had she misread the situation? Did they just get swept up in the rush of the Game?  
“Well, now I’m thinking something else entirely. Just uh -- nevermind. Forget I asked.”

Tevra scolded herself all the way to the door. What a mortifying error to have made, mistaking friendship for anything else more than it was. _Mythal’enaste_ , she could have _sworn_ that everything was pretty straightforward between them. What she needed was a good night’s sleep and the sobriety of daylight to revisit all this - there was no way she could explain _anything_ in her state, let alone a series of small gestures that culminated in her thinking there was some sort of … attraction between them. Instead of even trying, she pretended to devote all her attention to the two locks on the door and checking the hallway, but in reality she was just doing anything _not_ to look at him. If he smiled at her again she’d be lost and the last thing she needed was some unrequited crush bugging her for the next several months, _especially_ if the feeling wasn’t mutual. She was far too old for that nonsense.

Cullen stayed unnervingly silent as he pulled himself up from the bed and moved towards the threshold. Tevra was ready to close the door behind him and wallow in her own embarrassment until sleep finally pulled her under, but he froze just a step away from the hall. There were a tense few seconds where neither party quite knew what to do, so needless to say the kiss took Tevra by complete surprise, leaving her only enough brainpower to push the door shut.

She woke up in the morning to the feeling of pins being gently worked out of her hair, warm and content despite a dull full-body ache.  
“I thought I’d gotten all of those,” she slurred. Cullen shifted his hand away from her head to present her with a sizable amount of the little blighters. “Guess not. Alright, come on. Better get dressed. I’d like to get back to Skyhold.” Tevra gave his chest a pat and sat up to stretch, mostly trying to ignore the pain in her damn shoulder, but that was easy to do when she looked down and caught the sleepy smile aimed right for her. “What are you staring at?”  
“Nothing at all.”  
“Wh - _right_. Stop that. You’ll get us in trouble.”  
“ _Me_? You’re the one that asked me to sleep here.”  
“Sure, after you asked me to dance _on an open balcony_ , and then kissed me while the door was open.”  
“Well _you_ \-- you --”  
“Please, by all means, continue to prove me right. I bet you ten sovereigns that if we get caught, it’s on you.”  

Tevra let him off the hook easy enough with a kiss on the cheek, but whether Cullen liked it or not that bet was _on_. She was off the bed before he could have a word in otherwise and crossed to the vanity, hairbrush in hand and trying to make sense of the tangles in her hair. Through the mirror she could see him do that _thing_ where he was still smiling at her for whatever reason and had to look away for a second just to steady himself, only to look back.  
“What are we doing?” he asked. A fair question with only one answer.    
“I don’t know. Think we’ll figure it out?”  
“I hope so. I would like to.”  
“Me, too. So why did you sound so surprised when I asked you to stay last night?” It would bug her if she didn’t ask. Bugged her even more that she had to watch his reaction through the mirror because she was too nervous to actually face him.  
“I just… didn’t think it was possible that you felt the same.” If Tevra smiled any wider she was sure her face would rip in half. To protect whatever dignity she had left, she bent over and started to brush out the back of her head.  
“Unless you have ten sovereigns jingling around in your pockets, door’s over there,” she blurted. “I’d like to make it out of Orlais without getting killed for occupying the court’s hottest bachelor.”  

Cullen said nothing, but when Tevra popped back upright she was faced with that smile she was growing to love-hate so very, _very_ much. He kissed her before she could tell him to cut it out again, and knowing that it would probably be a good long while before they could steal away a few more moments alone to start figuring out _whatever this was_ , she allowed it.

Of course she was the fool grinning into the mirror when he finally left. Thank the Maker she never made a bet she couldn’t pay.

**Author's Note:**

> was i wrong to say nerds? i think not


End file.
